billwg wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> > Vista costs more than a computer in Australia
Keep in mind that you are assuming the MSRP for Vista (which edition?).
> Maybe so, royboy, but that just goes to show how customers really
> appreciate the convenience of Windows compared to the alternatives.
Most customers don't ever get the opportunity to make an informed
choice.
They use whatever is installed in the system. Most people who pay that
rediculous price for windows are people who are on the road, have a
presentation to give in almost no time, and the computer gets
completely disfunctional. If the presentation is worth spending $1500
for the air-fare, $200-400 for the hotel, and $200 for meals. The $399
for Vista Ultimate is just "emergency PC supplies software". But since
the corporation pays the bills, you can bet they are watching for how
many times someone on the road has had to buy Windows, Office, Visio,
and Project - because a box crashed. And it doesn't make them
particularly eager to buy the next round of Microsoft toys at even
higher prices.
> Maybe you could help make linux more convenient to obtain, then maybe
> there would be more interest. Maybe not. I can't say for sure.
What is the actual percentage of people who pay full retail price for
Windows?
I would guess that's it's about 90% LESS than the number who BUY Linux.
Yes, there are people who buy a PC with Windows preinstalled,
they don't count.
There are purchase upgrades because their PC only came with Home
Edition.
They don't count.
There are students who purchase "Educational Edition" because the
school requires it.
They don't count.
What we are talking about is the total number of people who purchase a
copy of Windows XP Professional - full edition, for the purpose of
installing on a machine that has never run Windows before.
> Of course customers may decide that you are right and will start
> exploring other ways to do their tasks.
It's really hard to get a good count. Appearantly, about 7-14 million
people use Linux as their primary operating system, which would be
about 2% of all of the machines sold in the last 10 years. AKA the
"installed base".
On the other hand, it seems that a substantial number of users use
Linux "part time" in some form. This might be cygwin, live-CD,
dual-boot, or virtualization. Virtualization is getting very hot, and
many people are now using Linux as the host for their virtualized PCs,
but still use Windows for such tasks as accessing "Firefox Hostile"
sites.
There is a pretty good case that about around 100-150 million users,
about 15% of the total installed base, are part-time Linux users.
These people consider Linux a "value add" to Windows, rather than a
"replacement" for Windows.
The irony is that many of the most popular web sites, such as Google
and Yahoo, are based on Linux or BSD Unix, and lots of OSS. Nearly 1
billion users "use" Linux or OSS in some form, even though they don't
really know they are using Linux.
> But you haven't been right
> yet, so there isn't any real guidance here.
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